Unalienating Excellence

We began our dehumanization when money started changing hands. Matthew Crawford gets at something of the sort in his book Shop Class as Soulcraft when he suggests that we’re more motivated by excellence than we are by money. This is to say that we’d rather do something we’re good at and do it well than do something we take no joy in and perhaps don’t find compelling just for the paycheck. Crawford puts this in Aristotelian terms and claims it’s an aristocratic idea, which he later rejiggers as communitarian.

That’s a piece of unnecessary intellectual jujitsu: it’s no affront to democracy to say that we want certain people to be better at certain things than we are. I have no taste for carpentry and little ability. I hire it done because I want my doors to hang straight and my cabinets to close. Political equality and universal suffrage has little to do with ability; it’s what we use to even out the power differentials that inevitably arise. The only excellent work it is set out against (ideally) is excellent tyranny.

In fact, and Crawford to his credit points this out, the bigger threat is that distortions of the marketplace will prevent people from doing what they do at the highest level they can. After all, excellent poets would love to make money writing poetry, but even the best have to teach for a living, sapping away precious energy and time from their art.

But, of course, current market theory says that taking a job you love that pays less than another position open to you is “irrational.” Common sense says otherwise. That discrepancy exists because current market theory was created and is championed by people whose primary motivation is the acquisition of cash. They project their own avarice on everyone, going so far as to define it as rationality itself. Since the people doing the hiring and creating the corporations and running the financial markets are schooled in current market theory and are, themselves, greedy, they force us all to live in a world in which the primary motivating factor must always be the acquisition of money. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This mistake goes back to Adam Smith who contended that most everyone was governed by self-interest. Smith also formulated the idea that if the market moved away from a certain kind of work, the “invisible hand” would move workers to retrain for more sought-after jobs. It’s telling that the “invisible hand” term appears in Smith’s Wealth of Nations only in passing and only to describe this phenomenon, not all market forces. But it’s also based on a false premise. Smith supposed that a laborer could learn the “rudiments” of a trade in a few weeks, and that prudent tradespeople would save their money for these inevitable times of career-switching. This seems absurd now, with “high-tech” jobs sometimes requiring years of schooling, but it wasn’t even the case in the 1770s when Smith had the idea: apprenticeships lasted for years not just because the guilds wanted to control labor, but because it takes years to develop marketable skills. Nobody is going to hire a rudimentary carpenter no matter how cheaply he’ll work; if you want the frame of your house to stand up you’ll spring for a journeyman, and if you’re rich for the master’s work. By so grossly underestimating the time it takes to develop marketable skills, Smith displays his bourgeois ignorance and undercuts pretty much everything he has to say about labor and what it’s all about.

Arguably, the mechanization and regimentation of work has made skills themselves nearly moot for the majority of what were once considered “labor” positions. McDonald’s is a case-in-point. Its “Spee-dee” delivery system is not a series of devices but a series of routines, all standardized, all able to be translated to any McDonald’s restaurant in the world. As Eric Schlosser makes clear in Fast Food Nation, this system exists in order to make the McDonald’s worker easily replaceable. The system itself requires little or no skill: follow the routine behind the counter and you’ll end up with the same Big Macs and Chicken McNuggets on the customer end. This has the ancillary effect of de-skilling the labor force in the fast-food industry. As Matthew Crawford might put it, the Spee-dee delivery system makes individual agency on the part of McDonald’s workers unnecessary. There is no need for the skills or intuitions possessed by a skilled cook. When the meat is done, when the fries are the perfect golden-brown, knowing just how much “special sauce” will make a Big Mac sing are all predetermined. There is no need for the worker to even want to be excellent, no incentive to be anything other than menial. When agency is gone, so goes pride in one’s work. This, in turn, helps keep fast-food wages down. Taking pride in your work, feeling it is a part of your being, makes someone think that perhaps it makes sense to make a living at it, and a living wage is not part of the fast-food industry’s business model. Because the work is valueless, as the worker adds little value to it, so too the worker is written off as valueless, both by her employer and by her culture.

The irony of this is that paying people a living wage, encouraging excellence, and developing individual agency may in fact lead to even more efficient systems, and certainly to better products. But then, better products are also not part of the fast-food industry’s business model; consistency is. After years of this sort of mediocrity, we’ve come to expect nothing better. Now all they have to do is keep us from being utterly let down. This has long been the bugaboo of industrial production: do you make it well or do you make it with consistency? An actual craftsperson can do you one better. She can make it exactly to your specifications. After 200 years of industrial production, that idea seems utterly foreign but for the most exotic of products: expensive suits, mansions, yachts.

The quality vs. consistency problem is almost always solved in industry by siding with consistency. Consistency is both more measurable and more likely to lead to mass appeal, which, when one is working the supply-side, is the most sensible thing to do. Pop music is given the widest promotion if it isn’t too good: quality can be difficult to listen to, and it can also create polarizing reactions in focus-groups. Pop music does not just seem to be made to appeal to the lowest common denominator; it actually is. So is McDonald’s food.

By creating a baseline, a corporation is able to more easily measure deviation, and it is easier therefore to build those systems of routines around that standard. Work is routinized and training time decreases. If the system is really good, the company no longer has to even worry about managing the process: it can be—has been—outsourced to people who have no knowledge of or interest in the product’s actual use. We’ve seen the dangers of this from melamine-laced dog food to cadmium jewelry, but the list could go on. It’s Marxian alienation as way of life.

Quality, on the other hand, is a good deal less measurable. It can come in a variety of forms and is dependent on a product and the situation of the product’s use. What makes a sod house perfect for the plains makes it disastrous for an earthquake zone. On the prairie, a sod house is easily and quickly made, it insulates in the winter and stays cool in the summer, and it requires little maintenance. In Japan, building a sod house would mean literally digging your own grave. These aren’t considerations you can stamp out in a factory; they’re qualities dependent upon situations.

Quality also leads to excellence; in fact the terms are often used interchangeably. An awareness of this relationship defeats alienation. If you get good at building sod houses—we call them earth-sheltered houses now—you end up with a dwelling that literally becomes part of the landscape. It isn’t just a hole in the ground; it’s a hyper-efficient, cutting-edge, “green” technology.

Quality, therefore, requires someone with a vested interest in the product itself, not one who is merely interested in the money. The big money is in tract houses, and the nation is full of them. Most of them are ill-suited to their environs: fire-prone in California, hurricane-bait on the Gulf coast, vastly under-insulated in the Northeast. As consumers we’re trained to love them and want them and pay huge amounts for them when they’re placed stupidly on the edge of town, but a conscientious builder, one who cares about quality, would educate his buyers and build for them something that he could be proud of. Even our fast-food worker, now only able to suggest a certain cheaper combination of value-meal, would be going off-script if he steered us toward a better, or even a customized, choice.

It’s this consistency vs. quality problem that has percolated through industry and begun to pollute the streams of knowledge. It has already rendered much K-12 education toxic through the No Child Left Behind act. The idea that we can somehow standardize the educational experience is absurd enough on the face of it, but what NCLB contends is that we can, and should, standardize teaching as well. By following a routinized pattern of “best practices” we can, of course, get fairly consistent results, but this approach rarely fosters excellence. Operant conditioning can also produce consistent results, and if that’s really what we want, we ought to just turn educational institutions into giant Skinner boxes and be done with it. We’ll also end up with a nation of extraordinarily well trained pigeons. I think a democracy requires something else.
My point here is not that industry should suddenly focus on quality and excellence: they tried that in the ‘90s and ended up turning those words into empty slogans. Rather, I am saying that there is no such thing as menial labor; all work, if it is truly worth doing, in some sense requires skill. I agree with Matthew Crawford that individual agency is important, and that this is what unravels alienation and makes things worth doing. But I’d like to go beyond that and say that “worth” is the important word here, that our pursuit of excellence in what we do ought to be more important than our GDP. Markets are present-tense stories we write about who is in charge and what is important to those people. It’s not anymore manipulative of a market to direct it toward excellence as it is to plot it toward making Microsoft’s products ubiquitous, in fact considerably less so. The genius of the guilds, for all their abuses and depredations, was that they put a worker and his tools at the center of the market equation.

In the end, what we do is a reflection on what we value. Human values creep in regardless of the avaricious set’s compulsion to keep them out. Even Donald Trump claims that he’s not in it for the money, but the pursuit of the “art of the deal.” It should not surprise us lesser folks that more highfalutin’ business deals get done on the golf course than in the boardroom: even CEOs are victims of the soulless workplaces they create. On the links they can be people and pursue quality instead of mere consistency.

Isn’t it about time they gave the rest of us the same right?

An Open Letter to President Barack H. Obama

Dear Mr. President:

If you’re wondering why your party lost Ted Kennedy’s senate seat in Massachusetts, you should stop listening to what Katie Couric has to say about it, or Fox”News” or even NPR. They’re all going to repeat the same old Beltway bromides that your inner-circle of Clintonites (most of whom you should fire) are already telling you. They are going to tell you the same thing that Scott Brown is saying: the Democrats moved too fast on health care, have created too much debt, have gone too far to the left.

They’re all wrong. The problem is exactly the opposite. You and your party did not move nearly fast enough or boldly enough on health care. You let the bill get watered down and become useless. You compromised with the Republicans and the Blue Dogs. The Republicans, of course, are not now nor will they ever negotiate in good faith. Sure, Olympia Snowe might, but the rest of them are going to shoot at you no matter what you do. If you tack right, they will shoot at you. If you tack left, they will shoot at you. They are not interested in solving the nation’s problems because their base, rich people, are doing fine with the status quo, and their populist voters, the so-called Joe-the-Plumbers, have a long and sad history of voting against their own self-interests. The Republicans are about in gaining and keeping power. You should have moved forcefully ahead with real reform without them while you had the chance.

It’s too late now, of course, or almost too late. But this is an object lesson in American governance, and you’d do well to listen if you don’t want to become a lame duck after your first year.
In Washington DC, they think that if you’re not on the left and not on the right, you must be in the middle. This is idiocy. Some independent voters are actually far left: Greens and Naderites like me. Some are far right of various stripes: John Birchers and black-helicopter loonies. Some are well-meaning but utterly misguided libertarians. But the vast majority of independents, the so-called “swing voters,” simply have no strong political commitments whatsoever. How else can you explain the fact that many of these self-same voters voted for candidates as different as you and your immediate predecessor? This isn’t moderation; it’s mindlessness. In Massachusetts, they voted for Scott Brown even though he tapped into every fake-ass populist cliché in the book: the pickup truck, the open collar, the use of the words “shoved down our throats” and “real reform.” This isn’t change you can believe in; this is change you can’t articulate. The fact that swing voters couldn’t see through such flimsy political cladding means that they simply don’t know what they’re doing.

Granted, they think of themselves as moderates, but so does everybody. The fact that they hold few strong political convictions, however, translates into them supporting candidates who do, or who appear to. George W. Bush talked strong, and swing voters liked that: he made them feel definite, part of something stronger and bigger than themselves. He was a remarkably weak leader, of course, befitting his remarkably weak mind, but he had Dick Cheney around to do the heavy lifting for him. I hate to say this to you, Mr. President, as you are an intelligent and well-educated man and an eloquent one, but the swing voters voted for you not because of what you said on the campaign trail but because of how you said it.

If you’re thinking toward fall and the mid-term elections, and I suspect you are, then you ought to be thinking about how you can appear to be strong. And if you don’t want to get your nose dirty, as I suspect you don’t, send out Joe Biden to speak forcefully in public for you, and send out Rahm Emmanuel to break heads in private.
Above all, use language people can believe in and suggest legislation that will actually help. Don’t let conservatives in your own party get in your way; if they aren’t on board, they should be cut off come the next election cycle. That’s party discipline, and it’s another thing the Republicans do better than you Dems do.

Strong liberal leaders are ones who pushed through reforms that seemed drastic but were actually reasonable reactions to drastic times. Think FDR. They created programs that we all now love, like Medicare and Social Security. You may have noticed that times are drastic. You need to act accordingly if you want to solve real problems and leave an FDR-like legacy.

Oh, and if Scott Brown and John McCain want an open debate on the health care bill, give it to them. But use the old high-school debate technique of requiring them to come up with a better solution. When they can’t, be prepared with hard facts about how your bill is better and exactly who it’ll benefit. Most of you are lawyers, for crying out loud, and you can’t even win a debate with the simpletons on the other side? You can’t stop there, though. Congress may be about debate, but winning the public is about marketing. Hammer that message home again and again and again. I want to see and hear about a viable Democratic agenda as often as I saw and heard those damnable “five-dollar footlong” Subway commercials.

This is no time for compromise. The Republicans have had the ball in the right-wing endzone for so long that even a single yard toward actual reform of health care or banking or environmental policy seems like a victory. It’s too late to think incrementally: we need a touchdown, and, at this point, that will only come in the form of a hail-Mary pass.

Sincerely,
T.S. DeHaviland

Hiring for a Constancy of Purpose

Since it doesn’t look like my beloved Wichita Eagle is going to publish my editorial along these lines, I take to the neo-pamphleteering that is the Internet.

Few media commentators have even hinted at the fact that our recent economic troubles are the result of 30 years of decision-making at the corporate level. We didn’t really get into this mess because of the corrupt bankers on Wall Street; rather, their bad behavior was dangerous precisely because the “fundamentals” of our economy are, contrary to what this president and his predecessor have said, pretty seriously messed up.

The bad blood between management and labor is over a century old, of course, but suffice it to say that corruption in organized labor in the ’60s and ’70s made workers pretty ripe for managerial revenge. This took the form not just of anti-labor legislation under Reagan, but of what we used to call outsourcing, an idea that now goes under the more gussied-up moniker of globalization. It was like the weather, they said, an inevitability, they said: they being market analysts and investment bankers, CEOs and centrist and right-wing politicians, in other words, exactly those people who were likely to see a bump in the prices of their stocks and the near-term profitability of their companies if they got rid of their single biggest expense: the workforce.

And so it went. American companies dismantled their factories, shipped jobs off to Mexico first, then to China. The investment-class, bankers, and corporate types engorged themselves on the imagined wealth of very really rising stock values. But the market is a story we tell ourselves about value; GE was worth more when it fired workers in the US because the analysts said so, and the analysts believed it to be so because they were paid to believe. They acted as our shamans and we worshiped at their Manolo Blahniks, content in the certainty that we would soon enter a Golden Age of the high-tech “information society” where we’d all be “information” workers.

Sadly, as the Internet geared up, we found that it made information rather cheap, and so information work wasn’t really going to pay off all that well. But at least we could enter the “service” sector, which did turn out to be high-tech after all: we could sell Chinese-made high-tech goods at Best Buy. Part time. At a fraction of what we used to get paid for unionized factory work.

Fortunately, Alan Greenspan was around. Nobody understood what he said (think high priest instead of shaman), but he kept credit cheap and that’s what counted. We might not be able to pay it off in a reasonable lifetime, but we sure could rack up the debt, buying all those Chinese-made high-tech wondertools we love so well. Thus our manufacturing economy was turned, over the course of a few short decades, into one that relied for 70% of its value on consumer spending.

Are we Americans idiots with our money? Sure. But at least when we had real jobs paying genuine wages we could afford to be idiots. The supposed “best and brightest” on Wall Street turned out not to be much smarter than Average Joe: they figured out that with easy credit and all the money that was diverted from defined benefits programs into 410ks, they could leverage huge amounts of money for very risky investments that promised massive returns. And the rest is recent enough history that I need not repeat it here.

The problem isn’t that these people gambled away all our cash. The problem is that we have nothing with which to replace it but more gambling. We have long since sold all the tools we used to have to actually make things. We are like a carpenter who sold his plane and chisel and saw and blew the proceeds on a trip to the casino. If you are wondering why the “recovery” has been jobless, just think of this man. The Wall Street bailout began by Bush and continued by Obama has simply been like a rich uncle borrowing money from the mob (in this case our biggest creditor, the Chinese) to give to our gambling-addicted carpenter so he can head back to the craps table.

Gutting America’s manufacturing base wasn’t the weather; it was the result of conscious decisions on the part of some very wealthy and powerful people. It was stupid because the American worker and the American consumer are the same person. The rich got their revenge on labor. But they also their comeuppance and had to be rescued.

We need not bring back organized labor to solve this problem. If unions disturb you, then forget about them. There’s a much simpler solution, and none other than Henry Ford understood the fundamentals of it. Ford was no friend of labor, but he did realize that if you want a customer base for your new product–the Model T, in his case—the best way to get one was to build one. So he paid his workers $5 a day, enough to able to afford a Model T on the installment plan.

We need to do something similar but on a national scale. I propose a relatively simple piece of legislation: make it law that if you want to sell a product in the United States you must employ a number of Americans proportionate to your sales. They wouldn’t have to be manufacturing workers; they could be designers or engineers, salespeople or repairmen, but they must be Americans. This law would pertain to both US and foreign companies. No one doing substantial business here would be off the hook: if you want to sell here, you must hire here, period.

Obviously, very small and boutique producers would be exceptions. A guy building custom kayaks in his garage in Finland need not hire any Americans if he wants to sell a few here. But then, he’ll be no threat to the Coleman company’s canoe business.

Naturally, fiscal conservatives will howl that this is a protectionist measure, government interference in the natural workings of the market, a dangerous manipulation, and so and so forth. But then, wasn’t all the union-busting of the ’80s at the behest of the corporate classes government interference? Wasn’t the creation of a massive and risky market in derivatives a manipulation? Wasn’t all that packaging of “globalization” and the “information society” to a desperate workforce manipulation? Isn’t even the idea that the investors are “job creators” when they are busy outsourcing and downsizing and laying off also a manipulation?

More to the point, the free-market fundamentalists have had thirty years to prove their case, that letting them run the economy will lead to unprecedented wealth for all Americans. They have failed to make that argument work in the real world.

Is it protectionist? That I freely allow. But it is no more protectionist than what the Chinese do when they insist that they won’t buy Boeing’s 787 unless a certain portion of the plane is made in China. Since it has become fashionable to hold the Chinese up as paragons of the virtues of globalization, let’s at least be on par with them in terms of protecting what we worked so hard after World War Two to achieve.

A more damning counter-argument is that my proposal would push American companies offshore permanently, that they would just set up shop in Dubai or Hong Kong for good. If they are really that disloyal, let them go. Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s former company, already has. Arguably, the real money to be made isn’t in the US anymore but in emerging economies like China and India. Perhaps so. But those economies still rely on ours as the place to sell all the junk we used to make. The Chinese hold so much of our debt not just because they want a certain amount of geopolitical leverage with us but also to shore up their own most lucrative market.

Besides, the parsimony that follows centuries of hardship isn’t going to be wiped out overnight. Asians are savers in ways we haven’t been since the wake of The Great Depression. The Chinese and other Asian people are also infused with Confucian values that honor prudence and fiscal restraint. Even tried-and-true Madison Avenue tactics won’t make these emerging market buyers go into debt to buy the latest consumer goods the way Americans already do. By making companies that sell here hire here, we would, like Ford, effectively be underwriting a line of credit to the American people, one we work and produce for and that’s based on something real, not one floated on a credit card application and a prayer to High Priest Greenspan.

But it would have an ancillary effect: low-risk investors and banks could reserve some of their money for businesses that would have a solid customer base and that actually made things. They would not feel forced into derivatives and collateralized debt obligations in order to keep up with the market or hedge against its uncertainties. And then perhaps those of us who actually save our money might be rewarded for it instead of being punished with interest rates below the rate of inflation.

Rather than being a radical law, this one would create a foundation for those values that conservatives claim to hold dear: hard work, personal initiative, prudence, patriotism. These values are only meaningful if they are allowed to flourish, if we can create a system in which they are rewarded rather than punished, in which they are not ridiculed as the follies of the overly-cautious but as the best practices of the economically wise.

The Fool’s Errand of the Security State

The Christmas attempt to take down an American airliner and the following and predictable obsession with security is simply another reminder of how far we are from “defeating” the terrorists.

More pat-downs and high-tech scanners won’t do a thing; as long as there are sufficient numbers of people who are upset with Western foreign policy, a few of them will be motivated to randomly kill Westerners.

So here’s an idea: stop doing things that piss off the terrorists.

Of course, it’s not as simple as it sounds, but neither is building an ever-more invasive security regime. The difference between the two is that the former works and the latter does not.

And if anyone seriously believes that this would be somehow “coddling” terrorists or “negotiating” with them, consider that the terrorists may actually have a legitimate beef with us. That they choose an illegitimate means to redress their grievances is immaterial to their claims.

We know this process works because the British used it successfully to disarm the IRA. Granted, it took them a century of “troubles” to figure this out, but the violence in Northern Ireland has considerably declined since the Brits started listening to and taking seriously Sinn Fein’s complaints.

By not listening to the Afghans, Saudis, Yemenis, Pakistanis and so forth who are angry at us, we merely prove their case: that we don’t view them as fully human, as enough like us to have genuine thoughts and feelings. Thus we doom ourselves to another forty years or more of terrorism.